ONCE I’D ENTERED, IT WAS THE DECAPITATION RITUAL I noticed first. It was certainly not what I’d expected to find in an eel restaurant. Not that entering an eel restaurant was high on my list of expectations in life, but neither was bearing witness to a decapitation.
I should note that it wasn’t the eel being decapitated, but a bowl of fruit. As I sat down at table number four, one of nine tables with red plastic numbers stuck onto the white-tiled walls alongside, in Nhà Hàng Miến Lươn at 87 Hàng Điếu, in the capital’s Old Quarter, I surveyed the stainless steel surface in front of me.
Vinegar, chopped chilies, chopsticks in a holder, a tissue rack. It was then I noticed the girl in a yellow top sitting at the table next to me in the less than half-full restaurant at midafternoon. She had a red basin full of small fruits.
“Small tangerines, not lemons,” she told me.
With a blade, she very carefully lopped the top of each green-skinned fruit so that the stalk end held on by a slim slither of skin. The customer could then grab one from the bowl on the table, pull back the decapitated “head,” and squeeze it over a spoon. The trick is then to pour the juice into the soup, but keep the pips on the spoon to discard (onto the floor, naturally). The decapitation detail was ingenious, pretty, and time-saving. I never ever saw this particular method anywhere else in Việt Nam.
The small tangerines, it turned out, were actually calamansis, which have a slightly sour yet sweet orange flavor that injects zappy power into eel dishes, whether they be rice porridge, glass noodle soup, or a stir-fry of vermicelli and eel. Calamansis, it seemed to me, were the ideal supercharger for any eel dish.
How I found this joint is another matter. It was the dark brown fried stuff in the glass cabinet at the entrance that first caught my eye.
“Foreigners come here in the evening sometimes. They think it’s worms they’re eating, not eels,” Lê Hoàng Hà, the manager and son of the original owner, told me with a big laugh.
The restaurant, situated on a prime piece of turf opposite Hàng Da market, had been in the Đồng Thịnh family, at the same location, since the mid-eighties. They started out as a bánh cuốn shack before introducing miến lươn.
“The customers preferred our miến lươn, so we ditched the bánh cuốn end of the menu,” Hà explained to me on one visit. Although, when I asked him if that meant his bánh cuốn was total dross, he ignored me.
“My aunt still makes bánh cuốn outside on the pavement every night. In fact, we have four relatives in Hà Nội who still make and sell bánh cuốn.”
Hà was one of six siblings, all of whom worked in the food trade. The eel on which this restaurant built its reputation was cooked elsewhere in Hà Nội, somewhere downtown. He would never tell me exactly where. It was as if he thought I’d go and muscle in on his order, set up a rival joint, or just plain mess with things.
It was always when you got to that line of questioning that the Vietnamese would clam up and you morphed from an interested, curious, oddball foreigner who appeared out of the ether with an obsessive interest in their food, into a threat, a competitor, someone not to be trusted.
I experienced this same suspicion more acutely while wondering what to order at a seafood, snail, and offal restaurant on Trúc Bạch Lake in the north of Hà Nội one evening. The “English Menu” I was given went beyond comedy on a headlong journey toward travesty—“Fried crap” and “Testicles in medicine” being two memorable, mouthwatering highlights. I was so enamored of the menu I asked for a copy of it as a souvenir. The manager came over and politely but firmly said, “No. What if you want to copy it and open your own restaurant with the same menu? I can’t allow it.”
At that point I wasn’t sure what was funnier, his menu or the seriousness with which he defended it. His restaurant closed within the year. And, in a time before digital cameras, I never did get a copy of the menu.
The eel cooks, wherever they were hidden, would deliver the precooked brown shreds to the restaurant and deposit them, pouring the fish from their sacks like grain into the glass cabinet for all passersby to see and inspect.
“Having them cooked elsewhere saves us a lot of time,” Hà explained. “To remove all of the bones, to clean them and then cook them is a long process. Quite laborious.”
Nhà Hàng Miến Lươn opened at 6 A.M. and closed at around 9 P.M. In a day, they’d go through thirty or forty kilograms of cleaned, boned, and fried eel.
Hanoians, so I’m told, tend to eat eel dishes mainly in the evening. The small front room at Nhà Hàng Miến Lươn could become packed very quickly, with customers often spilling out onto the street alongside Auntie’s bánh cuốn setup.
There was never a huge amount of flavor involved in any of these eel dishes, hence the need for the ever-present calamansi to tickle its underbelly and the rau răm (Vietnamese coriander) to propel it along. What eel and noodles did do well together was texture. The fried and crispy coupled exceptionally well with the slippery and noodly. It was a winning combo that kept me coming back, whether to pull up a stool or to sit on my motorbike, engine left putt-putting like a true Hanoian, and order a mang đi về (takeaway order) like umpteen others every evening. (Actually, that bit about the engine isn’t true. I’d turn it off. Honest.)
I was repeatedly warned not to eat too much of the rau răm herb, which I always found curious. Why? I asked one day.
“You won’t be able to perform if you eat too much,” said Hà.
“Perform what?”
“You’ll become impotent,” Hà told me with a completely straight face.
To balance my impending lack of virility, Hà explained the benefits of eating eel.
“Eel is very good for your back bones, and even better,” he said, “if you take a shot or two of snake alcohol with it.” I never quite subscribed to this theory, but then again, I never had a bad back in Việt Nam.
When the bill came, it was always on a yellow Post-it note. They’d jot down what you’d had to eat and drink and stick it on your table. That way, the four wall-mounted fans that continuously circulated, cooling customers and soups, would not blow the tab away into a bin, onto the tissue-laden floor, or off down the street. Notices on the wall even told customers, in Vietnamese, to take their yellow ticket to the counter at the end of their meal.
An old woman, the original owner, was in charge. Like a slightly friendlier version of Jabba the Hutt, the women in these places never seemed to move very much, but always appeared to be in total control. Decked out in a flowery brown áo bà ba, this particular silent, blobby maître d’ would take my yellow slip, take the money, and hand back the change without so much as a sniff, a grunt, or a thank you.
Hà Nội. Old style.
It was at this joint, back in 1997, that I first jotted down a few notes. The address, the dish, the cost, what it was like, the ambience, how packed it was. It was a habit I continued throughout my tenure. At the time, I had no idea I’d compile a food guide to the city, eventually sell words for a living, or start a blog. Blogs did not exist. I’d only just registered for an e-mail account.
I could e-mail a limited amount of text at a time over the barely-a-kilobyte-per-second connection. The paranoid theory doing the rounds was that the authorities couldn’t read and monitor more than a page of text at a time, and therefore limited the amount you could send. The wider world of the Internet was, for the time being, prohibited by the government.
You see, I’m not one for jungle treks, whitewater rafting, traversing the Andes on sustainably bred albino llamas, or swimming with disabled lesbian dolphins off the coast of the Bahamas. If a year in Korea had taught me anything, it was that I liked trying interesting food. I couldn’t think of a better locale than Southeast and Northeast Asia to just plain gorge. Food was safari enough for me.